How Well Is E-Learning Working?
It is no secret that the pace of life today’s society is quicker than ever. Everyone is constantly in a hurry. Higher education has become a factory spitting out students with “degrees” in whatever they choose because no one has the time or money to devote to truly mastering any given skill. Thus, the university is stuck with a problem of trying to keep up with the magnitude of students. The university system has done many things to try to keep up with the growing magnitude of students, graduate and undergraduate. They have tried to higher more professors, have very large entry level classes, raise the bar to get into the university, and of course online courses (which I refer to as e-learning). The latter of which has my undivided attention because e-learning is just the opposite.
At this point in my education I have taken many online classes. The majority of them have been through the business college and the college of education. All of them, however, share one distinct quality they are of poor educational value. I feel that I did learn some valuable things from some of these classes, namely Differentiated Instruction and Economics; however, overall, the education from them are lacking. In an online class you are often left alone to read on your own, do a “discussion”, do an “assignment”, take a quiz, and perhaps watch a lecture (if you’re lucky).
In those classes that you do not have a lecture to watch the assignments that are given are essentially glorified book reports. These book reports then get assessed and unless you did not read or understand the material you get a very good “grade” on that assignment. The problem with this is that while the book report/assignment shows that you understood a single aspect, it does not get into the depth of your understanding. The quizzes that are then given often reflect the reading and perhaps the content of the class. At times a professor misjudges how they are teaching. They feel that they can move super quickly because the students should be able to read and understand everything they get with out question or discussion. Then when they quiz or give an exam their students do terribly and have to curve their test with up to twenty points (that I have personally seen in Finance).
When these things occur one would think that it sends a message that the online system is not working how it was intended to. Another issue with the e-learning system is that in some classes there is no difficulty. At times they can just be e-busy-work. Instead of learning something every time one “logs in” to a class they are forced to wait for peers to post for the week or wait for a teacher to finally get around to answering a question. There is such a delay in response and interaction with many of these online classes that they loose intrinsic value.
Imagine a student in a class has a burning question, raises their hand, and then is ignored. The student goes home to research online in vain. The next class period they again try to get their question answered; however, the class has already moved on to a new topic and thus the student with the question is now behind. That is the type of thing that happens daily with an online class. Some students are not engaged in learning when they can not learn using their learning style (in this case interpersonal). Now, imagine that this is even more complicated because you speak English but the classes are in Korean. This is how frustrated an ESOL or an ELL student would feel. Even more complicated would be those students with disabilities (mental or physical). While there are some things that can be done to help these students (ESOL, ELLs, and those with disabilities) the help that is offered at the university is limited, at best.
Another topic that comes to mind when the subject of e-learning is discussed is the controversy of if internet reading is considered “reading” at all. I read in the New York Times an article that had both sides of the story. Many seem to feel that online reading is not real reading and that even if one were to read an academic journal online it was different than reading it as a hard copy. What I assume from an argument from that is that reading hard copies in their mind uses different cognitive abilities than does reading online. This leads to my question. If this is a genuine debate then how can the university system assume that online classes are equivalent to live sections of those classes? Taking that even further, how can the university system be sure that it does not take different cognitive abilities to complete an online class than a live section of that class?
In my opinion, e-learning is just not functional for what graduates at any level are expected to learn from them. It does not compete, educationally, with a live section of that class. The only good things about them are that they are convenient and they save the university system money. Both of these things are nice but do those benefits outweigh the fact that they are lacking educationally? I feel that there are more beneficial ways of dealing with the problem of over population than online classes.
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